The recurrence of financial crises in recent years has sparked renewed interest in the controversy over the implications of financial openness for the stability of the financial system. This article examines the relationship between capital account liberalization and financial stability in 31 sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1996-2015. Firstly, the study uses the Exchange Market Pressure Index (EMP) as the indicator of the degree of financial risk. Then, to determine the timing and the nature of the effect of capital account liberalization on financial stability, a finite distributed lag model is used. The estimation of long-term structural coefficients is obtained by the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) method in panel data. The results show that liberalization of the capital account negatively affects financial stability after two years in sub-Saharan African countries. These results suggest that sub-Saharan African countries should standardize their strategies for liberalizing capital accounts and engage reforms to promote long-term capital flows that are more stable and improve the macroeconomic and institutional environment.

The double negative shock on supply and demand following the COVID-19 health crisis has strongly impacted the labor market with an unequal distribution. Unlike earlier empirical works that explain the unequal exposure to layoffs following the crisis by socioeconomic and geographic factors, while distinguishing between core and non-core industries, we focus our analysis on layoffs in Start-ups in the United States of America (USA) by branch of activity. We compute the probability of a start-up worker being laid off according to the branch of activity in which he or she works, using a binary logistic regression. The result shows that the health shock did not impact all the branch of activities in the same way and with the same extent. The “Media” activity is by far the most affected by the layoffs. The “Infrastructure”, “Construction”, “Transportation”, “Product”, “Support”, “Education”, “Finance”, “Travel” and “Marketing” activities were also affected, while the “Food” activity was spared due to the fact that it was maintained during the crisis.